As Speedcafe reports, McLaren arrives at the Mexico City Grand Prix locked on 355 points with the reigning constructors’ champion, yet sitting fourth on countback because Red Bull boasts four second-place finishes to McLaren's two. Having already been mathematically eliminated from defending its title following last weekend’s United States Grand Prix, the squad is now in a scrap to secure third in the standings. Unfortunately, the machine simply isn't quick enough right now.
“You just have to keep fighting,” Piastri said. “I think at the moment, we know we’re not as competitive consistently as what Red Bull are. But we’re adding performance to the car still. And there’s a lot of things that can happen. Reliability has been a big topic this year, so there’s still plenty of ways it can turn. But clearly on pure performance, we need to make some steps forward. And we do still have some things coming to the car that’ll hopefully help with that. But I think for us it’s going to be a big challenge to stay ahead of Red Bull. But we’re always up for it.”
I think the layout of the circuit actually lends itself pretty well to these power units. You’ve got kind of a nice even distribution of straights and slow corners,
Teammate Lando Norris offered a blunt assessment of their difficult campaign, stepping up to defend the team's development despite slipping behind the opposition. “The car has been horrible and difficult to drive the whole season, just other teams have brought a lot more upgrades since and improved a lot more than what we have. Nothing more than that,” Norris said. “The team is still doing a good job, considering we were almost one and a half seconds off at the beginning of the year, one second off. The fact we even won almost three races was a pretty sizeable achievement in itself.”
For Piastri, this weekend gives him a chance to finally break a brutal run of results. The Australian has now gone 14 consecutive grands prix without a podium finish, meaning another failure to reach the top three here would equal his longest career drought of 15 races, set during his first 15 starts in 2023. Following a seventh-place finish in Austin, however, the team has managed to untangle some of their mysteries.
“I think we’ve got some answers, not all of them, but I think we’ve got a pretty good idea of certainly a direction of why things weren’t quite as smooth as we would have hoped,” he said. “A lot of them are things I can keep working on for this weekend. Some of them have been similar to some of the struggles earlier in the season as well. So there’s plenty of races and laps still to go to keep working on.”
Looking ahead to the venue itself, Piastri suggested that the layout of the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez might suit the characteristics of the 2026 power units, though the exact toll of the altitude remains a mystery. “I think the layout of the circuit actually lends itself pretty well to these power units. You’ve got kind of a nice even distribution of straights and slow corners,” he said. “So I think from a straight line speed and deployment point of view, it should look relatively normal. But whether you use a whole bunch of energy making up for the turbo or not, we’ll find out tomorrow.”
FP1 for the Mexico City Grand Prix begins at 5.30am AEDT Saturday.
